Cash Flow Statement with Management Reporter

Cash flow statements are tricky to create. There are beginning of the period balances, period activity, and end of the period balances that have to be correctly queried and reported. You also have to make judicious use your chart of accounts to accurately account for transactions that will make cash flow statement reporting easy to do.

Ryan Sandness at Microsoft has created a nice video at the Dynamics Corporate Performance Management blog. He covers the most difficult part of creating a cash flow statement. You still need to make sure that the accounts you use will give you the correct information. Fixed asset purchases and retirements can be problematic.

Ryan keys in on these three important points:

Account modifier in the Row Definition to return beginning balance or year-to-date amounts for the cash accounts rows

Non-Printing rows and columns used for calculations

Advanced cell placement for calculating the beginning cash balance

From a finance point of view, a cash flow statement is crucial. It’s an early warning system for future problems. If you can make it easily come out of your accounting system, that’s fantastic.